From the exhibition
Monkey Shines of Marseleen
· July 12, 1908

A six-panel Sunday newspaper strip following Marseleen, a mischievous monkey character, through a sequence of escalating gags. The strip demonstrates early comic page design: uniform panel grid, speech balloons, and sequential action that builds across frames. Marseleen attempts to gather fruit from a tree, leading to increasingly chaotic results. The artwork employs bold black silhouettes characteristic of newspaper production, with detailed backgrounds establishing setting through crosshatching and linear perspective. This strip exemplifies the visual conventions that emerged from turn-of-the-century newspaper comics—recurring characters, modular panel structure, and gag-driven narrative—that would become foundational to the comic book medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain